Poems begining by M
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My People
© Carl Sandburg
MY people are gray,
pigeon gray, dawn gray, storm gray.
I call them beautiful,
and I wonder where they are going.
Murmurings in a field hospital
© Carl Sandburg
COME to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .
Muckers
© Carl Sandburg
Of the twenty looking on
Ten murmer, "O, its a hell of a job,"
Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."
Moonset
© Carl Sandburg
LEAVES of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moons good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.
Monosyllabic
© Carl Sandburg
LET me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool,
on a child.
To-day, let me be monosyllabic
a crony of old men
who wash sunlight in their fingers and
enjoy slow-pacing clocks.
Momus
© Carl Sandburg
Momus is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.
Mohammed Bek Hadjetlache
© Carl Sandburg
THIS Mohammedan colonel from the Caucasus yells with his voice and wigwags with his arms.
The interpreter translates, I was a friend of Kornilov, he asks me what to do and I tell him.
A stub of a man, this Mohammedan colonel
a projectile shape
a bald head hammered
Does he fight or do they put him in a cannon and shoot him at the enemy?
Mist Forms
© Carl Sandburg
THE SHEETS of night mist travel a long valley.
I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist.
What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all?
Memoranda
© Carl Sandburg
THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.
Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.
These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.
Memoir of a Proud Boy
© Carl Sandburg
HE lived on the wings of storm.
The ashes are in Chihuahua.
Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado
Memoir
© Carl Sandburg
We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago Auditorium.
A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive and rapid from floor and gallery.
Medallion
© Carl Sandburg
THE BRASS medallion profile of your face I keep always.
It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets.
It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall.
I carry it in a special secret pocket in the day
Masses
© Carl Sandburg
AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
maneuvers, I stood silent;
Mask
© Carl Sandburg
Fling your red scarf faster and faster, dancer.
It is summer and the sun loves a million green leaves,
masses of green.
Your red scarf flashes across them calling and a-calling.
Mascots
© Carl Sandburg
I WILL keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger.
I will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die with.
I will stab you between the ribs of the left side with a great love worth remembering.
Margaret
© Carl Sandburg
Many birds and the beating of wings
Make a flinging reckless hum
In the early morning at the rocks
Above the blue pool
Where the gray shadows swim lazy.
Manufactured Gods
© Carl Sandburg
THEY put up big wooden gods.
Then they burned the big wooden gods
And put up brass gods and
Changing their minds suddenly
Manual System
© Carl Sandburg
MARY has a thingamajig clamped on her ears
And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in.
Flashes and flashesvoices and voices calling for ears to pour words in
Faces at the ends of wires asking for other faces at the ends of other wires:
All day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in,
Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears.
Manitoba Childe Roland
© Carl Sandburg
LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and whistling a wolf
song under the eaves.
I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe
Man, the Man-Hunter
© Carl Sandburg
I SAW Man, the man-hunter,
Hunting with a torch in one hand
And a kerosene can in the other,
Hunting with guns, ropes, shackles.
